Dr. Charles Fraser is the Surgeon-in-Chief at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) where he oversees the entirety of the surgical enterprise, including over 100 full time children’s surgical specialists and 500 staff. Dr. Fraser maintains active research interests including congenital heart surgical outcomes and quality, transplantation, mechanical circulatory support, brain protection, and bioengineering. In 2002, his team developed the first pediatric lung transplant program in the Southwest, which has subsequently grown to be the nation’s largest.
In 2005, he performed the first successful pediatric heart/lung transplant in the Southwest. He implanted the world’s first DeBakey Child™ Cardiac assist device in March of 2004. Dr. Fraser served as the National Principal Investigator of a pivotal, first ever, multi-center pediatric ventricular assist device trial to assess the safety and benefit of the Berlin Heart Pediatric EXCOR® ventricular assist device. This device was subsequently approved in December 2011 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for clinical use – the first device to be approved specifically for small babies. In 2011, Dr. Fraser’s heart failure team implanted the first total artificial heart at a children’s hospital. Dr. Fraser received his MD from The University of Texas, Galveston. His postgraduate residency education was at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where he specialized in general, cardiothoracic and thoracic transplant surgery.
He also completed fellowships in pediatric cardiac surgery at The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, cardiac transplant research at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and cardiovascular surgery at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Texas. He was a staff member in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Cleveland Clinic Foundation prior to his recruitment to Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in 1995 to establish a new, focused congenital heart surgery unit. He earned his BA with honors in mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin.
